Loglines Are Not Taglines…

… Cannot. Stress. This. Enough. Every week I see scores of pitches – sent to my inbox, my ears or via script listing sites – and every week I see Loglines and Taglines being mixed up. PLEASE STOP.

TAGLINES

A tagline is the strapline you see on a movie poster or DVD box. These are thought up by the PR guys usually and have NOTHING TO DO WITH THE WRITER, it’s well after the writer has finished his/her involvement. Of course, sometimes writers are asked to provide taglines – sometimes when looking for finance, other times when taking part in initiatives like the (now defunct) Eon Screenwriters Workshop. I’ve done both and coming up with taglines can be challenging and very interesting – AS LONG AS you don’t mix them up with loglines!!!! It’s one of the most obvious ways of turning the reader OFF your pitch.

Here are some taglines I found on a basic Google search:

“He lived the American Dream… With a vengeance.” (Scarface)

“An epic of miniature proportions” (A Bug’s Life)

“EARTH – take a good look. Today could be your last.” (Independence Day)

As you can see, taglines rely on puns and/or make reference to stuff the “average joe” already knows about — ie. the fabled “American Dream”, the notions of winning/losing, contrasting words or famous song lyrics (Busy Lizzy’s “The BOYS are back in town”), etc.

The best taglines are SLICK and CLEVER — the worst are obscure and forgettable. Weirdly, very often the WORST films have the BEST taglines if you read the list I’ve linked to above.

The three taglines I hear the most from screenwriters:

What would you do?

Every age/time/place/city/story/etc needs a hero/ine

and

One night. Three/Four/Five lives. [However many] problems/ stories.

As you can see, not one of these relies on pun, clever wording or anything else *of immediate interest* and are incredibly vague, so have little chance of “hooking” a reader. Of the three, the second is definitely the best, but lacks the ability to grab my attention simply because I’ve seen it SO MANY TIMES before.

LOGLINES

In contrast, Loglines are a basic DESCRIPTION OF THE PLOT of your script. This is your chance to SELL THE STORY of your script, so you want it to be dynamic as possible: you want to GRAB the reader and make them WANT to read your script.

The more HIGH CONCEPT your script is, the simpler (and more concise) your logline should be. For example, the logline for Alien Vs Predator might be:

The two mighty creatures slug it out underground using humans as bait.

Or Independence Day:

Only two men can save the world when Aliens attack and attempt to loot and destroy Earth on July 4th.

Immediately we KNOW what kinds of movies these are – there will be explosions, fighting, monsters, maybe a little gore. Right on! We can do similar with just about any other GENRE script — if it can adhere to convention, has some kind of “pre-sold” concept attached — ie. aliens, serial killers, a love story, a fight to the death, vampires, etc – then we can slot it into high concept territory.

LOW CONCEPT scripts are a more “complicated sell” as they are a little more difficult to describe, so require lots of attention to get right. Sometimes they have very original central concepts (which require lots of exposition); other times it’s more DRAMA than GENRE territory – and the question of “how much is enough?” rears its head in terms of selling the story off the page.

I would argue lots of TV scripts fall under this category — they are often more complicated/convoluted stories because they have up to six hours’ of story to cover, rather than 1.5 hrs’ worth. This is why I recommend my Bang2writers write TWO loglines on their pitch docs – one covering the series AS A WHOLE, the second covering the pilot that is enclosed with the series bible.

Writing loglines is hard — which is why it should NEVER be approached lightly. Don’t just dash one off and send it out — get people’s opinions of it first!!! Thanks to the internet, blogs, forums, etc it’s never been easier to get someone’s opinion on your logline… No one is going to balk at reading 25 – 40 words. So what are you waiting for?

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“The lives of three childhood friends are changed forever when a shocking secret forces them to confront a dark past.”

Don’t take this offensive, but my friend, you shouldn’t be so conceited about your gift. It’ll stunk your growth as a writer as it clearly did with this log line. The students of my master class just edited your log line and therefore shown you that in does NOT just flow… at least not in you. But with some work on practice and humility, it will.

Haha, brilliant. Jared was taking the Mickey! How do I know? Because he took the taglines I flagged up as bad – and he’s also a very good friend of mine offline. “Stunk” is a brilliant Freudian typo, tho 😉

I hate writing loglines. I find it SERIOUSLY hard. I always end up thinking I've got it and then going back to it and realising "no" so I go back and re-work it and then it's this endless one step forward and two steps back that goes on forever, rather like this sentence…

I know that you're supposed to have it all done and dusted before you open a shiny new Final Draft document but I usually end up coming up with one and then re-visiting it between drafts. Sometimes, the logline only becomes obvious in the writing. Or at least clearer. Which in turn helps the next draft.

I write by the seat of my pants 🙂 The logline/tagline comes for me at the end as well…. Am I doing it wrong? No, I've won awards. It really depends on what type of writer you are, as Charles Deemer states at his site. Need to get back there, as I have a long overdue blog entry pending on my own site. That you can't get to from here….

“If she doesn’t learn how to open her heart and trust – her actions will be in vain.”

These are very familiar phrases, clichés TBH. They tell us very little about the plot and sound as if you’re describing *around* the story, which is a common mistake with loglines. Focus in on WHAT HAPPENS, most writers concentrate too much on the characters but generally at grass roots level it’s the story concept industry pros are interested in first, character comes *after* that. Hope that helps.

I’m sorry but I can’t enter into further dialogue re: any more loglines. For anyone else struggling with their logline or feel they need more info, there’s free help available via the bundle in The B2W Required Reading List dedicated to loglines (www.bang2write.com/resource) or, if you want, my book “Writing And Selling Thriller Screenplays” breaks down all the components of a great high concept logline. Available from Kamera Books’ Creative Essentials range, bookshops or via Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/-/e/B00EZ45CIC